Annie Jump Cannon (1863 - 1941)

Annie Jump Cannon was a US astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types.She was a suffragist and a member of the National Women's Party. source: Wikipedia Cannon suffered hearing loss sometime during her childhood or early adult years. Some people claim Cannon's hearing loss made it difficult for her to socialize, resulting in her immersing herself in her work. She never married and did not have children. In 1896, Cannon became a member of "Pickering’s Women," a group of women hired by Harvard Observatory director Edward C. Pickering to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, with the goal of mapping and defining every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of about 9. In her notes, she referred to brightness as "Int" which was short for "intensity." Pickering said that she was able to classify stars quickly, "Miss Cannon is the only person in the world—man or woman—who can do this work so quickly." Cannon and the other women at the observatory were criticized at first for being "out of their place" and not being housewives. Women did not commonly rise beyond the level of assistant in this line of work at the time and many were paid only 25 cents an hour to work seven hours a day, six days a week. One of the other women in the observatory who made significant contributions, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, shared with Cannon the experience of also being deaf. Cannon dominated this field because of her "tidiness" and patience for the tedious work, and even helped the men in the observatory gain popularity. Cannon helped broker partnerships and exchanges of equipment between men in the international community and assumed an ambassador-like role outside of it. She wrote books and articles to increase astronomy's status, and in 1933, she represented professional women at the World's Fair in Chicago.

Known for
Annie Jump Cannon was the first woman to earn a scientific doctorate awarded at Oxford University. Discovered five novae

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